


i can see us (i can see love without fear)

by zeitgeistofnow



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Kyoshi Island, Post-Canon, Reunions, SO FLUFFY, Sparring, Yue (Avatar) Lives, rated teen for nudity, they are MARRIED and i do say wife quite a few times bc !! yes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26417137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeitgeistofnow/pseuds/zeitgeistofnow
Summary: “yue!” suki cries, and her wife spins on the toes of her boots to face her, ducking closer to where suki lies on the ground. suki laughs happily and yue presses countless kisses to her face, even though she knows her mouth will come away painted white with makeup.“i've missed you, my love,” she hums, and suki laughs again, eyes falling closed.
Relationships: Sokka/Zuko (Avatar), Suki/Yue (Avatar)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 108





	i can see us (i can see love without fear)

Sokka and Suki twirl around each other, fans dashing and feet sliding across the loose dirt, kicking dust up to stick to their sweat-melted makeup. Suki breathes hard, feeling the air burst in and out of her lungs, and she watches Sokka do the same as he dips under the latest of her swipes. 

His duck puts him back a few steps and Suki advances toward him, flipping her fans for just a moment to readjust them in her sweaty hands. There’s a reason they wear gloves, but the day is hot and bright and they only do laundry weekly. 

That split second of preoccupation is all Sokka needs, though, and he lunges his leg out to trip Suki and send her sprawling to the ground. He leaps up and starts to draw the boomerang strapped to his back- an addition to their sparring after fans grew old: the final blow must be delivered by another weapon, the time it takes to draw it adding a challenge- but before he can press it to Suki’s neck, something drops from the trees and knocks Sokka back onto the ground, spear stabbed into the ground right next to his neck. A clear victory. 

The victor’s hair loops bounce at the impact with the ground and the handle of the spear is carved with familiar patterns, ones Suki knows from fighting alongside its owner for years.

She’s  _ back.  _

“Yue!” Suki cries, and her wife spins on the toes of her boots to face her, ducking closer to where Suki lies on the ground. Suki laughs happily and Yue presses countless kisses to her face, even though she knows her mouth will come away painted white with makeup. 

When the chief finally pulls away, her mouth is smeared white and red from the few kisses that had managed to hit Suki’s mouth and she presses her forehead against Suki’s.

“I’ve missed you, my love,” she hums, and Suki laughs again, eyes falling closed.

“I’ve missed you too, my heart. You’re getting my makeup on your forehead, though.” She combs her fingers through Yue’s ponytail, fingers catching lightly on the snarls of travel.

“I am overdue for a bath either way.” Yue leans back again and Suki opens her eyes. “Perhaps with you,” Yue continues, “if you’ve finally found a bath basin larger than a wine barrel.”

Now that Suki can finally see Yue, she sees the way the other woman’s crow’s feet wrinkles have deepened in the months since they last saw each other, the way her eyes are just as bright as the moon, the way she looks as gorgeous as she did they first day they met. More so, maybe, in the way she fills the space she is given as if it could never belong to anyone else.

Suki ducks forward to press another kiss to Yue’s mouth, tasting rice powder makeup. “The Fire Lord had one sent at our request. Enameled cast iron with golden tigerdillo feet. You’ll love it.”

Sokka, who had been staring listlessly at the sky, perks up at the mention of Zuko. “Is he here with you?”

A quiet rustling from the trees behind them and the man in question ducks into the clearing, hair scruffy in the same refined way Yue’s is and traveling clothes wrinkled. “I am, in fact. Sorry my entrance was less dramatic than Yue’s,” he says dryly.

“Speak of the fool,” Yue says, tugging Suki into a sitting position, “and he will conjure.”

“Zuko!” Sokka exclaims, hauling himself to his feet and rushing to the shorter man to lift him into a tight embrace. Zuko buries his face in his husband’s shoulder and clutches at his back tightly enough that the fabric of his armor creases under his hands, which is going to be a bitch to iron out. Yue’s gaze turns back to Suki and she raises her eyebrows in a way that reminds there is no reason to begrudge them their reunion. 

Speaking of which, Yue’s mouth is still there and hasn’t been  _ properly  _ kissed since she arrived- really, since Suki last left the Northern Water Tribe- and Suki has spent months wishing that her wife was here to hold. Yue’s quiet smile says that she’s thinking the same thing, and it’s barely a conscious thought to lean closer to the other woman, to wrap her arms around the waist of her kimono.

_ “Gorgeous,”  _ Yue mumbles against her mouth, “I missed you so much, and you look so  _ good  _ sparring, it took all my self control to wait for an opportunity to beat Sokka.”

A laugh bubbles somewhere in Suki. “Victory was that important, huh?”

Yue hums a happy agreement and deepens their kiss, one hand on the small of Suki’s back and the other tangled through auburn hair. She tastes like salted meat- probably all she’s been eating for the week or two of her journey- and when they finally part her smile is soft and meant only for Suki. 

“I would always give up a victory for you, my stars,” she says, and then her smile turns sly, “but not if I can have both.”

Suki laughs and it comes out breathless. “You’ll never have to choose,” she promises, “never,” and Yue crushes their mouths together again. 

Behind them, Sokka twines his fingers through Zuko’s hair and murmurs teasing compliments, seduction sprinkled with questions about international politics, and Zuko smiles half-indulgently, half incredulously happy, and replies to every sentence in turn. 

Yue laughs against Suki’s mouth at a particularly indignant response from Zuko and she turns to look at the pair over her shoulder, slowly disentangling herself from Suki. “Come on, we should be getting back. We all have makeup to wash off now.” Zuko snickers at the smears of color on Yue’s face and she rolls her eyes at him. “Well, almost all of us.” Zuko famously refuses to kiss Sokka while he’s wearing Kyoshi makeup, too worried about messing up his own delicate face. Yue says it’s dumb, that life is too short to worry more than a moment about the way you look, but Zuko and Sokka have always been the vain ones and Yue and Suki have never begrudged them it.

Sokka offers both women a hand and they both take one, a balancing act to get both of them standing up without Sokka falling backwards. Once standing, Suki rushes to Zuko, tugging his hair out of a ponytail and scrubbing her fingers through it. He looks put upon, but leans closer to her and she grins.

“Missed you, jerkbender.”

“Missed you too,” he says, “and it’s high time I got a vacation.”

Yue and Sokka wander over, one of Sokka’s arms slung around Yue’s shoulder, and Yue smirks, ducking out from under Sokka’s arm to walk closer to Zuko. “Oh, is your desk job just  _ so _ harrowing? It must be so hard to sit and  _ read  _ all day in your gorgeous office. I-”

“ _ You  _ go hunting every day with the warriors and make dinner with the chefs, all the while managing ambassadors, I know,” Zuko says back. It’s obviously a back and forth they’ve had before and they walk a little ahead of Sokka and Suki as they talk. “You don’t have eighteen hour work days.”

Next to Suki, Sokka does quick math on his fingers- as smart as he is, neither of them ever quite mastered the effortless subtraction Aang boasts- and comes out with an answer he doesn’t like. “Eighteen hour work days?” He cries, and Yue hides her giggle behind a delicate hand. 

Zuko goes wide-eyed for a second, then waves Sokka away with one hand, covering a tired snicker with the other. “No, no, I’m just trying to win an argument with Yue. I go to bed at eleven every night.”

They seamlessly twist around each other so that Yue winds up next to Suki on the trail and she leans closer to Suki. She smells like dirt roads and something else, something inherently  _ Yue.  _ “Goes to bed at eleven and wakes up at 4,” she murmurs, just loudly enough that Sokka will hear. 

Sokka sighs heavily, like he only does when he’s trying to make Zuko or Suki feel guilty, and says, “I’m just glad you’re here now.”

And yeah. Suki’s just glad they’re here now.

Zuko and Sokka split ways from Yue and Suki once they arrive back in the village, back to Sokka’s hut where he will doubtlessly just wash his makeup off in a stream and toss his armor into a pile on the floor before tugging on a tunic and pants. For all that Sokka cares about how he looks, sometimes he goes long enough without bathing that Suki worries. He never seemed to completely grasp the idea that swimming is different from bathing with soap and bubbles, and that’s not Suki’s problem.

Yue and Suki watch them walk away before linking hands and walking the last few yards to Suki’s hut, watching villagers go about their usual days. Everyone is more or less familiar with the sight of the Chief and Fire Lord in their town by now, and Yue doesn’t get anything more than a few  _ hello, chief! _ ’s and smiles that she returns easily.

Suki’s rooms are full to the brim of furniture- she entertains most of Kyoshi Island’s guests in her main room, so a scattered assortment of couches and chairs in different styles sit in front of bookshelves of trinkets and novels. Gifts from dignitaries, royal families, her friends and everywhere where those categories overlap. The new bath sits on a raised pedestal in her bathroom, a small fireplace underneath it for heating the water and a complicated pulley system through the window to bring water in.

Sokka rigged up the pullies after Suki asked him to help bring in water for one of her baths one too many times- she doesn’t take many, preferring to bathe in the spring with the other warriors, but she  _ has  _ a bathtub, she may as well use it. He also figured out a few neat tricks for lighting the fireplace, which was obviously meant for firebenders to use with ease. 

Yue only has to examine the pulley for a moment, peering out the window to where the end of the line ends with a bucket half-submerged in the water outside, before she snaps her fingers and grins at Suki. “Oh, I get how it works! One of Sokka’s things, right?”

Suki grins back. “Right.”

“It’s intuitive, clean, I like it.” She rolls up the sleeves of her traveling clothes and stands with one leg braced on the windowsill and the other barefoot in the bottom of the porcelain bath. She starts to tug on the rope that pulls the water up to the bath, biceps flexing. Suki only admires her wife for a moment- which she’s allowed to do, they’re  _ married-  _ before she folds herself down onto the floor and starts rustling through woven baskets of soaps upon soaps, shampoos, scrubby vegetables from Ty Lee that Suki doesn’t know the name of and which she’s never used ever, a few backup jars of makeup.

Suki only ever uses the same almond soap bar that one of the Kyoshi warriors makes in the summers, the one that Yue says smells like sweetgrass, but she keeps them all for when her wife visits or when Mai runs out of the special fire nation soap she uses. 

Suki lifts two unused bars of soap up to her wife, who has the bathtub almost half-full. “Orange or, uh, jasmine tea?”

Yue wraps the rope around one arm, leaning back to balance herself and gesturing with the other hand for Suki to lift up the soaps. “I have to smell them,” she says.

Suki holds up them both in turn and Yue’s expression turns thoughtful. “Tea, I think.” She turns back to pulling in the water and her face lights up. “Oh! Do you have any?”

“To drink?” Suki has a lot of tea. A  _ lot.  _

“Yeah, I haven’t had  _ good  _ tea since the last time I was here. Zuko could burn water.” Yue’s smile goes bashful. “You mentioned in your letter that Kuei accidentally sent you a bunch of the rose tea I love because he got our names mixed up. Could you make some of that?”

Suki reaches up to press to kiss to Yue’s cheek, right below her eyes, and Yue smiles down at her. “On first name basis with kings, are we?”

Yue laughs, and it sounds like bells ringing, announcing that everything is right in the world because Yue is joyful. “You’re one to talk, oh wife of mine.” She bends down to press a kiss to the same place on Suki’s face, where she has a single brown mole. Suki feels her face warm happily.

Suki steps back and tosses the soap into the bath, watching it bob. “One kettle of rose tea for my love, then.”

The tea only takes a few minutes to make- boiling the water, rifling through cabinets for the loose tea Yue wants, stacking tins of cookies to bring into the bathroom. Zuko thinks that eating cookies with tea lessens the experience, but Suki thinks that eating cookies with  _ anything  _ makes it better. When Suki comes back into the bathroom, two cups in one hand and the kettle hanging from her other, Yue is already half-submerged in the bathtub, a fire crackling happily underneath her. 

Her traveling clothes sit, neatly folded, on the ground, and one unshaved leg hangs lazily over the edge of the bathtub. Zuko shaves his legs with the same kind of razor Suki has seen people use for their face, but none of the other three have ever bothered with the ritual. Too much effort for something no one would see at the Poles and no one would care about on Kyoshi Island.

Yue grins brightly at Suki and gestures at the other end of the bath. It’s the perfect size for two people who are comfortable around each other and the tray that clips over the side is just big enough for the kettle and two cups of tea, the tins of cookies stacked on the floor so that only the highest one is reachable. Suki gently places the kettle and mugs next to Yue and strips, leaving her sweaty armor draped over the sink’s basin. 

When Suki collapses into the bath the water level rises to a few inches below her collarbone when she slouches, and the water is cool but not cold near the surface and warm but not hot closer to the fire heating it. She sits with one foot on either side on Yue’s hips, her knees just barely breaking the water’s surface. 

Yue sighs happily and pokes at Suki’s knees, the stripes of scab and residual redness from bushwacking and rough sparring. “Still scraping your knees like a child, huh?”

Suki leans forward to nuzzle their noses together, relishing the feeling of warm water rippling around her. “Still enchanting me like we’re sixteen, huh?”

Yue giggles and rests her forehead against Suki’s for just a moment, both of them breathing the same slowly steaming air and reveling in their togetherness again.

Yue says, “I love you,” quietly, like it’s the first time again.

Suki says, “drink your tea and I’ll wash your hair for you, lover,” and they know it means the same thing.

**Author's Note:**

> \- this exists bc i was reading a gigolas fic (specifically [comes around again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2064171/chapters/7629719)) and uhh the amount of times gimli says "my husband" was so healing and the author did an incredible job of showing the joy of love and not just the yearning and i was like hm. i need that.  
> \- was rly going to tag this as "canon compliant" before i remembered that yue doesn't actually survive lol. also there r a few other details that conflict things that i don't actually remember whether they're canon or not, like ambassador sokka. in this au sokka helps his dads at the south pole about half the year and katara spends that half the year helping aang rebuild the world and doing politics with him and sokka spends the other half the year on kyoshi island!! i was originally going for "nb sokka is a kyoshi warrior" but this fic was v much Not About Him so i didn't get to that. but just know. nb sokka is a kyoshi warrior in this au.  
> \- let zuko and yue take a break,, they deserve it,,,,,  
> \- you can find me on tumblr [@lazypigeon](https://lazypigeon.tumblr.com/)  
> \- comments and kudos make my day!! i love u all and hope u have a great day :)


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